Akkam’s Razor

• The GOP ticket’s appalling contempt for science and learning. – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine – This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.
• FRAMESHOP by Jeffrey Feldman – Most Jewish voters–at least 75%–do not respond to this kind of email. They look at this kind of smear campaign and are offended by its abuse of Holocaust memory and by its attempt to undermine honest and open civic debate.

  So why do this? Why would any branch of the GOP use this tactic given the low possibility that it will work?

  In a word: cynicism. There is a faction within the Republican Party that has zero respect for the electorate, total disdain for Holocaust memory, and absolutely no interest in healthy civic debate. This faction would rather destroy civic culture in this country than loose an election. They would rather turn Holocaust memory into a sucker-punch email gimmick than take responsibility for their policies. Unfortunately, John McCain has fallen in league with this faction, both because he his campaign has given in to his own egotism and because his campaign has lost all semblance of organization.

• Science of the Occult: In-Depth Reports – Halloween conjures visions of ghosts, hauntings and many unexplained phenomena that play on our worst fears
• Fresh Intelligence : Radar Online : The Financial Meltdown: It Was In the Stars – The financial meltdown has occurred at an interesting time astrologically. In the current position of the planets, one can find clues about both the roots of the crisis and the road ahead:
• Orlando TV “Journalist” Barbara West’s Husband is a GOP Media Consultant – Oops! Looks like the "tough interviewer" who threw GOP talking points at Joe Biden is actually married to a GOP donator and media consultant.
• The AppGap » » NetAge OrgScope – Understanding the Real Structure within Your Organization: Work 2.0, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 commentary and reviews: apps, tools and practices – Through this kind of mapping, organizations can “see” things they otherwise couldn’t. In the case of the energy company, they discovered that their organization was not in the expected pyramid shape but rather a diamond. Instead of most of the jobs being at the bottom, most were in the middle. Instead of there being a relatively even distribution of management span, it turned out most managers (about 80%) had only a few people reporting to them while about 20% had a relatively huge number reporting to them, in one case, 38 people. And, to the surprise of senior executives, most of these high-reporting-span managers were five or six levels down in the organization, out of sight for the people at the top.
• New Left Review – Robert Wade: Financial Regime Change? – [W]e are witnessing a third regime change, propelled by a wholesale loss of confidence in the Anglo-American model of transactions-oriented capitalism and the neoliberal economics that legitimized it (and by the us’s loss of moral authority, now at rock bottom in much of the world). Governmental responses to the crisis further suggest that we have entered the second leg of Polanyi’s ‘double movement’, the recurrent pattern in capitalism whereby (to oversimplify) a regime of free markets and increasing commodification generates such suffering and displacement as to prompt attempts to impose closer regulation of markets and de-commodification (hence ‘embedded liberalism’). [3] The first leg of the current double movement was the long reign of neoliberalism and its globalization consensus. The second as yet has no name, and may turn out to be a period marked more by a lack of agreement than any new consensus.
• New Google Analytics Review – Custom Segmentation – A preview of the coming refresh.

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